65438-0863, went to the United States to work, worked as a hotel waiter, postman, chimney sweeper and so on. , and later became a reporter.
From 65438 to 0890, he went to Japan to teach English literature at Imperial University in Tokyo and Waseda University.
He became a Japanese citizen on 1896. Because he wanted to leave his legacy to his wife and children, he was named Yakumo after his wife Koizumi.
1On September 26th, 904, she died of a heart attack and lived in Japan for 14 years.
Mysterious Tales is a collection of short stories written by Koizumi Yakumo in his later years, which contains 55 Japanese ghost stories rewritten by him. His works run through the tradition of "mourning for things" in the field of Japanese culture and art and are highly respected. He is regarded as the originator of supernatural stories in modern Japanese mysterious literature.
Ralph Cadio Hearn is of Greek and Irish descent, and the ancient Greek and Celtic peoples are rich in fairy tales. According to fatalism, this man seems to be born with a story of ghosts and gods.
But he was out of tune with that era.
Koizumi Yakumo, a scholar who grew up in the West, endowed Dostoevsky, Mo Bosang and Mark Twain with living in the same era, breathing the same air and growing up in the same environment.
While those western writers devoted themselves to exposing social agitation and corruption, Koizumi Yakumo was addicted to the oriental artistic conception of "there is nothing in the world except me and the moon".
What he loves and is fascinated by is the strange legends hidden in the mountains and lakes of Japan.
Natsume Soseki is the representative of Japanese native writers who are closest to the creation time of Koizumi Yakumo's works. At that time, the romantic climax in Japanese literary world was only rhyme, and naturalism was on the eve of its peak, which was likely to sweep everything away.
While other writers are trying to improve their styles and increase the thickness of their works, Koizumi Yakumo is obsessed with digging and collecting all kinds of materials, completing the integration and sublimation of his own cognition and Japanese native culture again and again.
I have to say, he spent half his life and caught up with the good times.
His mastery of English writing grammar is similar to that of Chinese, which has always been praised by Japanese literary circles (due to different language families, the grammatical differences between Japanese and Chinese are actually greater than those between English and Chinese), and the English short stories orally introduced by his wife and rewritten by him are also highly praised.
The mountain gods, ghosts and landscapes he was interested in and rewritten belonged to a few acceptable fictional elements in naturalistic works that Japanese readers began to favor at that time.
In addition, when writing, he did not deliberately describe the horror of ghosts like the previous authors, but integrated history into the story by shaping and reappearing the artistic conception and atmosphere. The characteristic folk songs sung orally in Shimane Prefecture and various monster legends in Izumo area are endowed with unique ethnic customs and cultural connotations after being processed by Koizumi Yakumo.
Although his writing style is not as gorgeous as that of Japanese writers at that time, it is full of strong "local flavor" of Japanese traditional literature, or humor, or warning or allegory, with colorful and diverse forms. As a masterpiece of oriental horror aesthetics, Koizumi Yakumo's Collection of Mysterious Novels is also known as "the originator of Japanese supernatural literature".
The book Mystery Story is rich in content. For example, in Japanese history, the Pingjia people who were wiped out by the defeat, the secret of the arc, the kindness of the willow tree, and the revenge of the ghost ... These folk stories were collected bit by bit when Koizumi Yakumo lived in Shimane Prefecture. Its time-consuming is very admirable.
Koizumi Yakumo is a man of great perseverance. When he was young, his left eye was accidentally injured by a flying knot in the competition, and he was soon declared completely blind. Blindness in the left eye has dealt a great blow to the young Hearn (that is, Koizumi Yakumo)-in the few photos he left in his life, he appeared sideways or with his eyes closed, for the sake of the defects in his eyes and the pain he hid in his heart.
However, this kind of pain and physical disability also tempered his spirit and quality. After a series of misfortunes, such as the death of his parents, the bankruptcy of his aunt who adopted him, and blindness in his left eye, Hearn did not give up on himself.
19 years old, crossed the ocean and went to the United States to make a living independently. During this period, he experienced all kinds of darkness and injustice at the bottom of the United States in the19th century, and his life was extremely poor. However, in order to survive and his passion for literary creation, he became a journalist and writer.
1890, Koizumi Yakumo went to Japan as a special contributor for Harper Publishing Company in new york, and since then he has settled in this oriental country and started his own road to Los Angeles in Japanese literature.